Like most Englishmen, I tend not to talk to the person opposite me on the train, fearing that he may be an obsessed Ancient Mariner, keen to talk about albatrosses from London to Edinburgh. But who wouldn’t want to hear Hilton McRae’s Pozdynyshev telling his fellow travellers about life with the wife he murdered? He’s obsessed but he’s riveting — and he’s also the alter ego of the Tolstoy who was prone to leap on to his long-suffering wife, rape her, then go into ecstasies of puritan self-flagellation.

Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata is one of the world’s most upsetting masterworks and, as adapted by Nancy Harris and performed by Hilton McRae, it retains much of its mad, misogynist power. “Love is something low and swinish, something shameful and disgusting,” Pozdynyshev says in the original novella, “yet we pretend it’s beautiful and elevated.” I didn’t hear anything quite that extreme at the Gate. And if McRae misses anything, it’s the pathological intensity of Tolstoy’s revulsion. Yet I was still arrested, shocked, mesmerised by this mild-seeming Russian’s sad and terrible story.

He’s enchanted by the girl who becomes the woman tellingly called only “my wife” by him and “Wife” in the programme. She’s his sexual property and, as Sonia did for Tolstoy, she bears him several children. But then a violinist called Trukhachevski enters the domestic equation. Since Wife is a good pianist, she plays Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with the visitor and, since she’s beautiful and clearly frustrated with a demanding husband, a rapport grows between them. And Pozdynyshev finds himself transformed into the suspicious, hurt, vindictive Othello: which isn’t good news for Wife when she’s discovered sharing wine at midnight with the violinist she has pretended to send packing.

In a way, McRae’s refusal to strike ferocious attitudes is a strength. This excellent actor convinces you that a gently smiling man, whom you’d expect to have contentious views only about the weather, can harbour horrors within. A moment of delight here, a grimace of pain there, touches of bewildered regret combine to bring to life Pozdynyshev’s memories of the wife who, we in the audience realise, must have found him insufferable. For better or worse, he’s more objectively observed than in Tolstoy’s original, so slimier, more sinister, easier to dislike.

He has all the words, but there are glimpses of wife and violinist behind the scrim at the back of the stage. And their energetic playing of the Kreutzer doesn’t reflect only Poz’s confused feelings. At times it dramatises the illicit bond growing between them. Can you believe that Beethoven is disturbingly sexy? Here he’s just that.

Box office: 020-7229 0706, to Dec 5

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